Sensory, cognitive, and motivational capacities and processes are involved in every phase of the delivery of health services: in the judgments made by the diagnostician, in the securing of information from individuals concerning their symptoms or the sources of their health problems, in helping people to understand their roles in disease prevention and treatment, in communicating effectively with broad segments of the population concerning community or national health problems. We are attempting to develop a broad program of experimental, mathematical, and computer simulation studies of cognitive processes, - analyzing selected problems of special theoretical or practical interest in the laboratory, and tracing the development of normal cognitive functions in relation to age and particular kinds of experience. In addition to working toward integrative theories, we seek to extend our results to biomedical problems arising outside the laboratory by multifaceted analyses of specific topics, for example diagnosis, perceptual and memory deficits. Distinctive aspects of our program derive from our unusual setting. The strong biomedical traditions and resources of the University place us in an especially favorable position to develop theories which may help to bridge the gaps between the behavioral and biological disciplines; specific examples in the areas of visual information processing and organization of memory appear in the following sections. Our location in New York City makes it feasible to study the development of cognitive functions in a wide variety of cultural settings within a limited geographic area.